In no particular order…
1. RIVERDALE. Hot damn is that show a good time. The plot is high-test nonsense, but that’s not laziness on the writers’ parts, it’s savvy. They know what makes their show fun, and to keep the moment-to-moment humming, they gotta stretch credibility and throw everything at you as fast as they can. Serial killers! Evil nuns! Drug dealers! Motorcycle gangs! Musical numbers! Long lost evil siblings and uncles! A sharp cast and a gorgeous color palette makes it all go down smooth. There’s nothing this show could do that I would not accept. Aliens? Vampires? A time machine? Bring ’em on.
2. PRETTY BOY FLOYD. In the 80s, a professional pool player made an instructional video about how to be a master pool hustler (i.e, someone who goes to pool halls, plays for money, and makes a fortune). Over the course of watching this delightful video, it becomes abundantly clear that this man has never been in a pool hall in his life, and his research for this project probably amounted to watching “The Hustler” a few times, maybe even “The Color of Money.” So what you get is a man (in a tuxedo?!) taking one actual piece of advice–that you should start out intentionally playing badly so more people will challenge you–and stretching it into a solid hour of yammering the same point over and over again in different ways. Tolkien would blush at this guy’s ability to invent an imaginary world, one where every town has a “champ” and an “Ed,” where “trophies” are garbage and “cash” is king. The only thing he never does is actually teach you how to win a pool game, which was the stated goal of the video. It’s magical nonsense of the highest order. I love it.
My favorite lines:
“Let’s break this guy’s thumbs.”
“Oh no, Floyd, I know how good you are, you beat the champ over in Shimbogenwack (????) County.”
“CASH!”
“And that’s what I do, I order a sandwich.”
“Ed won?! Ed’s the worst player in here!”
3. BURY A FRIEND. This song absolutely slays.
4. SIMPLY SALAD. That place is delicious.
5. APEX LEGENDS. If you had told me three months ago that Respawn was making a battle royale game, I would’ve told you I didn’t want it, that I was sick of the genre. Respawn seems to have understood this, so they made it in secret and dropped it in our laps before we could all open our big stupid mouths and say no. 25 million players later, there should be no question who the best FPS developer in the world is. “Apex” has rekindled my love of the genre, while also annihilating my desire to play any other BR game, especially “Call of Duty’s” Blackout mode. It’s a true evolution of the genre, a ground-up rethink that adds grace notes and “ah ha!” moments to every corner of the experience. A casual gamer will enjoy it, but a seasoned BR player will marvel at its dozens of innovative wrinkles in the same way a wine connoisseur can taste all those “fruit notes” in a Pinot Noir that I have to lie about detecting. Also, I will never, ever be able to spell “connoisseur” without Google helping me. What a garbage word.
6. THIS TRAILER. What can I do to make time go faster?
7. LISTENING TO LOUD MUSIC WHILE WRITING. I used to think you should listen to “tonally appropriate” music while writing; i.e, listen to jazz if your script is set in the 20s, romantic music for a romance, etc. But the big man himself, Stephen King, disagreed in his masterful “On Writing,” pointing out that he listens to anything LOUD while he writes; anything that blasts distractions and the outside world away. I’ve come to see that he was, as usual, right. Music doesn’t need to put you “in the mood” of your piece, it needs to OBLITERATE that pesky outside world that keeps tapping you on the shoulder and interfering. It needs to seal you in a sonic fortress with your thoughts. The music you listen to while you write should amp you up, stress you out, and lock you in place. And not hip, cool loud like Neutral Milk Hotel, I’m talking BIG DUMB WALLS OF SOUND. LCD Soundsystem will not be able to help you here. You need to go talk to Deftones, Muse, Nine Inch Nails, Bring Me The Horizon, Sleigh Bells, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Oathbreaker, Metallica, Chelsea Wolfe, Hans Zimmer, Foo Fighters, Mick Gordon. Anyone who makes a mess on purpose. These are the people who will write your project with you. Think of them like spotters when you’re at the gym. Who wants a polite, whispering spotter? No one. They should bend over the bar and yell “one more!!” at you.
Do not make the mistake I made and agonize over a bespoke playlist for each project. Because you know what you’re not doing while you parse The Knife’s back catalog for that perfect chill paranoid track? YOU’RE NOT WRITING. Put together a writing playlist like you make a workout playlist. Aim for 15-20 tracks, and use the same one for everything. They should be songs you know pretty well but aren’t sick of; if you get sick of one, rotate it out. This is personal preference, but I’d avoid most hip-hop, it’s too lyrics-focused and I get distracted by it. No Bob Dylan for the same reason, you need words that form into a vague mush of feeling. And nothing slow, gotta be high-energy, lightning from your fingertips, go go go music.
Here’s my playlist. Now crank it up and get going.
8. CLARKS. Most of my shoes come from that place.
9. THIS SONG. Most electronic songs go for a big climax by speeding up or dropping the bass or whatever. SG Lewis says that’s for chumps and instead hits the checkered flag by… slowing way, way down? That should not work, but it does. It takes a good but not incredible chill track and turns it into something that should pay in a water level in “Super Mario 64.” Magic.
10. “SUPERSONIC.” The documentary on Netflix about “Oasis.” Even if you don’t like the band, you should watch it. I’m fascinated by Oasis, and by that I mean, I’m fascinated by Noel Gallagher. Liam I could give a crap about, you ask me he was dead weight, but Noel is almost literally Bill Nighy’s character from “Love Actually” come to life. He’s too old and too successful to care anymore, so he just tells it like it is, and none of us are ever ready for it. I never miss an interview with this man. I pull up a chair and find popcorn. There are other people this blunt, but most of them are bigots and their “truth” is just obnoxious. Noel is special because he’s old and cranky but never in an eye-rolling way, everything he says is true, you can feel it in your gut.
Case in point: an interviewer asks him to give advice to young bands. He replies, beautifully, “write a f*cking chorus.” What he meant was that it starts with you, and if you produce quality, things will happen. This has ALWAYS been true in my experience. A professor at USC once told me, “You could throw a great script out the window of your car on the 405, and it’ll get you SOMEWHERE.” I’ve lived by that advice, and where I’ve fallen short in my career, I try to focus less on the circumstantial factors that are out of my control, and more on what’s in my power. Great work makes waves. If you write something and there are no waves, it might not have been great. Try again.
Or, put another way, “write a f*cking chorus.”